I first saw this movie a couple of years ago and it’s still one of my favorites. While ordering a couple of new DVDs two weeks ago I decided to pick it up together with The Butterfly Effect 2 as the price of this bundle was only slightly more than the price of the Director’s Cut alone.

The movie is about a guy called Evan Treborn and you’ll see him through various stages of his young life, starting in his childhood. Evan is a pretty normal guy but during his childhood he suffers a lot from memory blackouts. This sometimes happens during dramatic events in his life, which involve his friends and relatives like Kayleigh (his love interest), Lenny, Tommy (Kayleigh’s brother) and his mother.

After one of these events Evan’s mother decides to move to another city and the story then jumps to Evan’s life at college. He hasn’t had any blackouts for seven years but when he starts reading one of his old journals, which he kept since he was seven to document the blackouts, he gets a weird flashback. Slowly Evan discovers that he can go back in time, to change the events that happened during one of his many blackouts.

One of the central themes of the movie is the butterfly effect, this means that one little thing can have a huge impact on everything else. This already becomes clear at the beginning of the movie as it opens with the following quote:

It has been said something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world. – Chaos Theory

Evan gets a firsthand experience of the butterfly effect as he goes back in time to change his past. He changes one thing but these little things have a huge impact on not only his life, but also the life of his friends.

When I first saw this movie I found it really thought provoking. Just like most people there are probably some events in your life that you wish you had done totally different. Evan is somewhat capable of doing this, but as you can see in the movie every time he tries to fix the past in order to improve the life of his friends (especially Kayleigh) either his or their life ends up getting a lot worse.

One thing to take in mind is that The Butterfly Effect has 2 totally different endings, the one on the Director’s Cut is totally different than the theatrical ending. The theatrical ending was still somewhat happy, while the Director’s Cut ending is really sad. Besides the totally different ending the Director’s Cut also includes various other scenes which weren’t used in the theatrical version.

The DVD also features various extras like audio and text commentaries, a documentary about the creation of the movie, the visual effects, a short documentary about the chaos theory and a short documentary about time travel. There are also a couple of deleted scenes, they are all in good quality and some of them are pretty interesting. They also included two alternative endings on the DVD but I’m a bit disappointed by the fact that they didn’t include the theatrical ending.

I really like this movie and give it a 9/10. It’s really worth a watch.